Do you ever wish you could go back in time? I do. I’d choose to go back to high school.
Good old, Old Rochester Regional High.
High school in general has gotten a bad rap. Many people hated their time in high school. My wife is one of them. “Those were the worse years of my life,” she says. Not me. What not to like? I was young with not a care in the world. Getting up at 5:00 am to catch the bus. No problem. Taking a nap in science class. Lunch at 10:30 am. Heaven, right?
I didn’t worry about paying taxes, paying the water bill, the cable bill or the state of the world. I left that behind in elementary school when “duck and cover” was no longer necessary. What the heck was the Bay of Pigs anyway? My only concern was how to get a few bucks to put gas in the tank of my car. Good times.
I was lucky. Good grades came easy. My folks never yelled at me to make the Honor Society, which of course I never did. There was one course that was a bit of a problem, though: Chemistry. I just couldn’t understand it. Maybe it was the naps! A friend who had moved here from Ohio had the teacher’s edition of the book, and I still flunked the semester final exam even with the answers!
I pointed out to the teacher that I didn’t need chemistry. I already had all the credits required to graduate and after all, I was going to art school to be an artist, not a chemist. To my surprise, he agreed, and I was allowed to drop the course. He was probably sick of me drawing on the desk.
I was on the cross-country track team at ORR. We ran on every golf course on the South Coast. Boy, could I run. I had to … to keep up with the boys at the front of the pack, lest I miss the bus home. Now I can barely walk to the corner without a rest. Give me the good old days. Keep the old part.
Our team won the very first state championship for the school. We each were awarded blue, blazer sports jackets with the school triad logo embroidered on the pocket. I was a big man on campus for a while. Girls chased after me … naw, just kidding.
I learned a lot of important stuff in high school that I could use a few years later in real life.
We once had a food strike in the cafeteria. Boy, was that fun. For reasons unknown, the cafeteria stopped putting bacon on the bacon cheeseburgers, replacing it with bacon salt. “Bacon salt is not bacon!” One sign said, “Bacon on burgers,” another read, “Skip the cheese, keep the bacon.” “We demand real bacon,” we chanted. After a week of not buying lunches, thus depriving the tyrannical cafeteria administration of its most profitable menu item, real bacon was restored to the menu … and they kept the cheese! A win for democracy!
I liked high school so much that years later, I gave up a lucrative profession to return to high school as a teacher. Love those 5:00 am wake up calls, lunch at 10:30 am, naps in study hall.
In high school, I was a “kid.” Teachers would say, “Hey you, the boy in the back row.” Strangers would call you a “youngster.” Now I’m called aged, elderly or a septuagenarian. Ugh! And if one more young doctor says I shouldn’t do something because, “… at your age …,” I’ll scream.
Friends ask why they don’t see me at the Senior Center. Because there are old people there. No offense to my friends of a certain age, but my mirror reminds me how old I am every morning. Some say age is just a number … a large one! I prefer a smaller number, say 17, as I was when I was a high school senior, not a senior citizen.
For nearly 20 years as a teacher, I hung around with teenagers. Now am Isupposed to hang out with old people talking about doctors and medications, cataract surgery, hearing aids and joint replacements. Not me.
Ya, give me high school … at least for a short time. Otherwise, I’d lose the nice pension I received upon retirement.
Editor’s note: Mattapoisett resident Dick Morgado is an artist and retired newspaper columnist
whose musings are, after some years, back in The Wanderer under the subtitle “Thoughts on ….”
Morgado’s opinions have also appeared for many years in daily newspapers around Boston.
By Dick Morgado